Learning to play an instrument has proved problematic for generations of aspiring musicians, and the use of traditional musical notation has often made such learning even more difficult. Even in advanced countries, only 2–3% of musicians are classified as musically “literate”.
A threshold problem is learning to produce desired notes on an instrument. Some individuals seem to pick this up naturally, but others have a great deal of difficulty remembering which keys, strings, or other elements produce which notes. Electronics have been employed for many years to solve this problem.
One class of solutions provides substantially immediate feedback to the user (musician) as to which note is being played. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,577,824 to Lavan (May 1971), teaches a device that produces small lighted areas on a display in response to depressions on the keys of a piano. The lights are associated with traditional stave notation, so that the user learns which keys correspond to which notes. More recently microprocessors have greatly extended this solution to the world of desktop, laptop, and even hand-held devices. An example is U.S. Pat. No. 4,827,826 to Hiroyuki et al. (May 1989), which provides a visual display that indicates which notes are being played. A particularly sophisticated embodiment was marketed as a computer game called Miracle Piano™ by Software Toolworks™.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,886,838 to Scherrer (June 1975) teaches a similar approach, in which lights are randomly displayed on a computer screen, with the user trying to identify the notes and play them on the instrument. Here again, substantially immediate (real-time) feedback is provided to the user by the computer.
Problems remain, however, in that these note-to-screen or screen-to-note systems fail to address quality of play. An early mechanical system described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,760,680 to Moore (September 1973) purported to teach playing style, but the Moore system as well as other known systems fail to adequately teach musical expression, changes in tempo, loudness, and so forth. For example, the known systems do nothing at all to teach legato playing, where successive tones are produced in a closely connected, smoothly gliding manner. The importance of legato playing is expressed in the following quote from How to Teach Piano Successfully, by James Bastien:                “The execution of the legato principle requires the student to play a key, hold it, and release it when the next key is played . . . . The process requires intricate finger coordination which may take some time to develop. However, it is vitally important for the beginner to understand this process and to be able to do it easily.”See also “pianoFORTE: A System for Piano Education Beyond Notation Literacy,” by Stephen W. Smoliar, Institute of Systems Science, National University of Singapore; John A. Waterworth, Department of Informatics, Umea University, Sweden; and Peter R. Kellock, Institute of Systems Science, National University of Singapore, published in ACM Multimedia 95—Electronic Proceedings, Nov. 5–9, 1995, San Francisco, Calif.        
Computer based systems have been developed that judge a performance or practice session, and provide feedback on the quality of play. Examples are U.S. Pat. No. 4,098,165 to Akiyama (July 1978) and U.S. Pat. No. 6,073,113 to Tohgi et al. (June 3000). Unfortunately, those systems are extremely complicated, and require the user to understand traditional musical notation.
Traditional musical notation is not straightforward, and the existing systems have not satisfactorily met the challenge of either obviating or conveniently teaching such notation. This failure is in part due to the high level of complexity involved. Traditional musical notation combines two distinct symbol codings, one for pitch, and the other for duration. Correct interpretation of the pitch notation requires constant reference to the key signature, while correct interpretation of duration symbols requires constant reference to the time signature. Other notations code for tempo, playing style, and expression. All of this can be extremely difficult for beginners to master, and indeed even for non-beginners as well.
These difficulties have been addressed over the years through non-traditional musical notations known as tablatures. For example, in the field of stringed instruments, the finger positions are often shown as black dots on a schematic of the frets and/or neck of an instrument. Tablatures are also known for keyboard type instruments. A continuing problem, however, is that the tablatures themselves are too complicated. In piano, for example, tablatures have been invented that provide a line for each black or white key. But there are so many keys that such an approach employs too many lines to be particularly useful. Another problem is that piano keys are usually tuned such that the change in frequency from one key to the next is not at all consistent. Still additional complexity results from the apparently inconsistent pattern in which the black keys are interspersed between the white keys. Yet another problem results from applying traditional nomenclature to a piano type keyboard, because the very same key on the keyboard can be considered a sharp in one key signature, and not sharp in another key signature. What is needed is a tablature that accommodates all these factors, while visually simplifying the keyboard.
None of the known systems have been particularly effective in resolving these problems, and none have been commercially successful. Thus, there is still a need for systems and methods that help users learn to play musical instruments, and to either learn traditional musical notation, or at least learn a tablature that supplements or replaces traditional notation.